How can marketers satisfy this unquenchable desire for new content? One technology that helps tackle the need for developing and delivering a constant stream of personalized content to customers is natural language generation (NLG).

November 2014 Issue

News Features

The mobile payments industry has been plagued by false starts and unsubstantiated predictions. Back in 2008, Juniper Research projected the combined market for all types of mobile payments would reach more than $600 billion globally by 2013. However, by June 2013, Gartner, Inc. predicted the market to be around $235 billion, which was nowhere near the projection from 5 years earlier. Why haven't mobile payments seen the adoption rates predicted in years past?

Before Twitter and YouTube could respond, millions of users saw video of journalist James Foley being beheaded. An equally large number of people were privy to naked photos of celebrities on sites such as 4chan and reddit, after a hacker illegally stole the photos from the cloud. These were eventually removed, but not before a surprising controversy rose up around these instances: Should social media sites be in the business of censoring content-and, by extension, users?

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Can a relatively mature technology help content publishers and marketers make website visitors more sticky and allow them to retain digital subscribers while also raising prices? The answer is yes.The science behind what is making the aforementioned possible--predictive analytics--has been around for quite awhile. In its former life, it was known as data mining. Add in Big Data and the rapidly maturing technology looks as if it's ready for its close-up.

Whether you make widgets or wine, sell consulting services or software, deep down inside of you, there's an author waiting to come out. Regardless of your writing skills or lack thereof, you and the business you represent have a story to tell-not a fairy­tale, thriller, romance, or science fiction adventure, but a nonfiction narrative that shares your unique knowledge and expertise with others who are hungry for it.

Sentiment analysis is like social media therapy. We attempt to learn how our audience feels about us-what are the complaints, issues, suggestions, and praise? We can also learn what they think of our competition, our industry, and our employees. Perhaps the most valuable data in sentiment analysis is what we don't find. It is alarming if your marketing is trying to highlight price, but there's no mention of it online. That indicates the need for a significant reassessment of your efforts. Sentiment analysis also becomes a powerful benchmark of your marketing programs as you can track the change in overall sentiment over time.

Columns

Let's assume you have an English-language, web-based business, including downloadable documents. To expand, you have to reach out to non-English-speaking customers. You must translate and transform your content for non-English speakers. When you get into the details, you realize this is complicated: Numbers may need different formatting, print and web layouts will likely need to be adjusted, cultural differences can be a mine field, specialized technical terms require deep expertise, and myriad other issues. You quickly realize that localization is a lot of work, and you may have to repeat it for each target language or culture.

In 1999, the world-renowned marketing professor Philip Kotler published Kotler on Marketing. In it, he discussed the 1990s as a time of tumultuous change. But he knew that this was merely the beginning. Kotler concluded the book with an entire section, called Transformational Marketing, in which he discussed how the field would change with the "new age of electronic marketing." In the coming decade, Kotler wrote, "marketing [departments] will be re-engineered from A to Z. Marketing will need to rethink fundamentally the processes by which they identify, communicate, and deliver customer value."

Thousands of years have done very little to change the design of the ax. A list of commoditized tools would have the ax right at the top. But, somehow, a small company in New York has managed a rebirth of this simple hand tool. And the difference has had everything to do with the storytelling and lifestyle. You can buy a $40 ax at your local home improvement store or you can pay $350 for the Lincoln from Best Made Co. Both axes will chop firewood, but that's where the similarities end. The Lincoln is backed by stories about quality, made in the U.S.A., and a campfire surrounded by friends sipping whiskey and swapping tales. With a simple approach of honest storytelling, an ax has been transformed. A commodity has become something unique.